The images of Baoyang Chen’s De Shan Shui are the witness to pure speed,
the vertiginous acceleration of cultural change in China. Since the end
of the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath, there has been
so much trafficking with the past in Chinese art, so many acts of
recovery, appropriation and rejection of tradition, even at the level of
language itself – the written character, the ideogrammatic element –
that time seems to circle on itself. The dream of the caterpillar is to
be a butterfly, but the butterfly also dreams, of the time it was a
caterpillar. With De shan Shui, Baoyang Chen has attempted to swallow
whole the most important tradition of image-making for China, and, in
digesting it, to leave the past decisively behind. No more butterfly
dreams.

Shan shui refers to landscape painting, or “mountain and stream”
painting, whose practice is millennia old. Depending on which scholar
you read, the apex of this tradition was achieved around 1000 AD during
the Sung dynasty. The approaches and techniques were based on inherited
ideas and practices, and the notion of innovation and novelty as virtues
was foreign. Perfection was to be discovered in the study of prior
forms, subjects and attitudes – and in following rules. Appropriation
by imitation. As articulated by artists such as Guo Xi, the rules often
exhibit a Taoist cast:

“When planning to paint, you must first balance
heaven and earth.”
“A mountain without haze and clouds is like spring
without flowers.”
“The painter’s attitude should be one of indifference
to all common anxieties.”

Baoyang Chen has transformed the genre by following a new set of rules.
The importance of this project is not in the application of photography
and digital technology to painting, an encounter that has become
familiar through the work of Gerhard Richter, Wade Guyton and many
others. Instead, he has substituted the operations of this technology
for an historical practice, stripped it of its spirituality, and
elevated chance to the level of perfection. Baoyang Chen’s “manual” of
painting practice, his rules, are a set of algorithms. These specify
operations the computer will carry out on photographic images the artist
has made of details from Shan Shui paintings – and on the seal that
identifies the artist or owner of the painting. The results embody a
novel form of process art and recall the work not only of composer John
Cage but also of conceptual artists from the 1970s and 80s.

In their colliding forms, indecipherable perspectives, and often
intricate tonal and textural shifts, these new “paintings” revise
landscape representation – including photographic representation – for
the twenty-first century. They uncouple it from all prior expectations
in order to open this genre (and the fact of its long history) to
contemplation. If any single feature embeds this work in Chinese
cultural experience it may be this emphasis on contemplation. Guo Xi
wrote: “But are the longing for forests and streams, and the
companionship of mists and vapors, then to be experienced only in dreams
and denied to the waking senses?”

De Shan Shui reconvenes the landscape as an experience of force and
energy, of perspective and mood, of convention and its rupture, of order
and chaos, and of the ultimate benefit and motive, the recognition of
beauty. To quote Guo Xi a final time: “It is with this in mind that
painter should create and critic should examine.”

Lyle Rexer is a New York–based independent writer and critic. His previous books include Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde (2002) and How to Look at Outsider Art (2005); he contributed an interview with Chuck Close and Bob Holman to A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, 2006), and is the author of Edge of Vision (Aperture, 2010.)